Broadcast Magazine - Article on 'Infotainment'

This past month, the reputation of America’s most recognised news journalist, NBC’s Brian Williams, has suffered an enormous implosion.

Williams was once ranked the 23rd most trusted ‘celebrity’ in the United States, but thanks to a series of ‘misremembers’, he now occupies the 835th slot and falling. For the anchor of the country’s most watched newscast, NBC’s Nightly News, such a precipitous fall is likely terminal.

Square-jawed, handsome and proud of originating from the Jersey Shore, Williams anchored the nightly bulletin for the past decade. In a series of performances and recollections over the past two years more becoming of Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy, he placed himself front and centre of historical events, both fictional and real. He destroyed his professional credibility and NBC has suspended him without pay for six months pending investigation.

Williams repeatedly claimed to have been on board a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire in Iraq in 2003; in fact, he was on another helicopter flying an hour behind.

His position as the $10million a year face of NBC News became untenable when it emerged that when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, he placed himself at events that he was either not there to see (the Super Dome suicide) or did not happen (floating bodies in French Quarter). This was, for the American public, unforgivable.

So why did he do it?

Any answer is speculative but the other ‘anchor’ that recently announced he would soon be vacating the chair, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, calls it “infotainment confusion syndrome”.

Williams is likeable and amiable. In each of the last five years, beyond his anchoring duties he has averaged more than 25 appearances on America’s late-night talk shows and popular entertainment programmes. To borrow the American expression, ‘do the math’: that’s one appearance every two weeks.

If the likes of Jon Stewart, John Oliver and Stephen Colbert have led the move from satire into news, then implicitly with NBC’s blessing, Williams was at the vanguard of the move from the opposite direction. Over the last decade in US news and entertainment, there has been a pincer move.

The driving forces are money, technology and shifting demographic, and in particular a focus on the ‘millennials’. Network news is seen as another branch of the entertainment industry competing for viewers. The anchors are the brand behind which the news operation sits.

Lest we Brits get all sanctimonious, there are worrying signs of a parallel trend here. As amusing as it might be, is BBC2 Newsnight, under the stewardship of Ian Katz, really the appropriate place for an interview with Cookie Monster? Is Kirsty Walk’s Thriller dance to close the programme on Halloween, or Evan Davis’ understated interview style with the likes of Russell Brand, so far removed from Williams’ Slow Jamming the News on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon? Arguably, it is worse. At least the Tonight Show does not purport to be a news programme.

Meanwhile the much-revered annual BBC Children In Need broadcast seems to find ever more outlandish ways for broadcast journalists to express their other talents and personalities. Under a cloak of charity, it demonstrates our conflation between entertainment and news running alongside the United States. This I believe should stop.

The errors in recollection and aggrandisement are Brian Williams’ own, but to see a likeable man and talented journalist self-destruct is regrettable.

Perhaps however it is the notion that on both sides of the Atlantic we are complicit in the deceit that is the fusion between news and entertainment that makes this more uncomfortable still.

Paul March is managing director of Marchy Management